The final act of what has been a long and exhausting US presidential campaign officially began last Monday night, when Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump met at Hofstra University in New York for their first presidential candidate debate. The highly anticipated face-off between the real-estate entrepreneur and the former First Lady failed to reveal anything particularly new about the candidates or the actual state of the presidential race. The 2016 campaign has been going on for so long that very few stones have been left unturned by either the opposing camps or the media.

The White House, most independent polls suggest, is still Clinton’s to lose. After Monday night, it is clearer than ever that she is the more ‘presidential’ of the two. Compared to Trump, Clinton is obviously more competent, relaxed, and articulate.

After spending the best part of her adult life moving freely through the higher echelons of American politics, she has indeed acquired, beyond dispute, the indispensable experience to do the job. She understands fully the complexities and hazards that the leader of the most powerful country in the world must face daily.

Trump, by contrast, sits on the far opposite end of the spectrum from Clinton. Until very recently he was just a rather colourful entrepreneur with a weakness for stamping his name on imposing buildings, appearing on reality TV shows and marrying beauty queens. Before officially entering the Republican presidential race, last year, Trump’s main claim to political fame since 2011 was as the most outspoken supporter of the so-called “birther” conspiracy (the claim that Barack Obama was ineligible for the presidency because he wasn’t born in America – an allegation the Republican Party nominee finally repudiated only a few weeks ago).

The debate, however, was also a reminder of one important caveat about the system of representative democracy: the system is only as good as the representatives the people elect to govern. If the elected forego their duty to act on behalf of the people once they are in power, the system is ultimately destined to fail.

After all these months, and after Monday night, can we really say Hillary and Donald are beyond doubt the best possible candidates to represent the majority of American people? Is there no real alternative? Is it too late for voters to send a signal that does not betray the spirit of democracy but rather fortifies it?

Are they fit for the task?

With just over 40 days to election day, an estimated record-breaking 81.4 million Americans tuned in on their TVs on Monday night to watch the candidates answer questions by Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor and host of the debate. Many more millions in America and across the world also watched via live streams on the web.

The presence of a flamboyant, unpredictable and politically incorrect candidate like Trump promised fireworks, a show to remember, not to mention countless soundbites for the mainstream media and the many social-media enthusiasts who weighed in online. The fireworks, however, never lit up the sky. There were a couple of misfires, some trifling quips, but overall the night turned out to be a mildly forgettable affair.

The first presidential debate

The majority of media pundits assigned victory in the debate to Clinton, on points. Though the former US Secretary of State never really managed to deliver the knockout blow many of her supporters had hoped for, she was able nonetheless to produce a series of consistent, well-aimed jabs at her opponent, making her the undisputed winner.

Trump, on the other hand, despite prevailing in the Twitter-hashtag-trend contest, only managed to deliver a largely incoherent and rather jumbled performance that was barely worthy of his maverick reputation. Though he started quite well, it didn’t take long for him to start losing his grip on the event.

During the early stages of the debate, the real-estate-entrepreneur-turned-TV-star-turned-politician was his usual self, though his characteristic cockiness seemed under the effect of some powerful sedatives or a self-restraining order. As the night progressed, however, he gradually caved in to pressure and spent most of his time (allocated and not) in his corner, trying to defend himself, throwing punches into the air but rarely hitting his target.

The debate told us nothing we didn’t already know about the candidates. Trump still has no clear policies. Once you probe his claims they all start to fall apart. A few times, Holt stopped just short of calling Trump a liar (as when the moderator reminded the candidate that there is no legal constraint preventing him from releasing his tax declaration during an IRS audit); other times he pulled him back on track and force him to answer questions he seemed to be trying to avoid (like on the issue of bringing jobs back to America from abroad: “Back to the question, though,” Holt cautioned Trump. “How do you bring back — specifically bring back jobs, American manufacturers? How do you make them bring the jobs back?”)

Before the night was over, we had confirmation – if we ever needed one – that Trump is a shrewd opportunist with very little regard for the middle class and minority groups. At one point, when Clinton accused him of rooting for the housing crisis so that he could ‘go in and buy some and make some money’, Trump quipped back with his customary bullish grin: “It’s called business, by the way.” Oddly, Clinton let the remark pass, somehow missing a critical opportunity to show the audience the heartless side of Donald J. Trump, the entrepreneur. It was her one true chance to deliver the knockout punch she was looking for. It was a perfect situation. She should have stopped talking, look Trump in the eye and then say: ‘They are called people, stupid!’ But she didn’t. Despite her many years of experience as lawyer and as a politician, Clinton is not the kind of debater who can come up with one of those one-line-quip that can sink a candidate’s campaign and make some presidential debates memorable.

Trump, on the other hand, hit Clinton on her record and managed, somewhat successfully, to paint her as a significant part of contemporary America’s problem. While he didn’t dare to call her by his favourite moniker, Lying Crooked Hillary, he hinted at it by describing her as the perfect embodiment of the mainstream politician who has failed the American people for far too long – who has ‘been doing this for 30 years’ and is only ‘just starting to think of solutions.’

But Trump’s efforts overall were more like hit-and-miss. The lack of a continuous live feedback (during the whole debate the audience rarely broke the NBC-imposed silence) might have been one of the culprits for his lacklustre performance. Like a stand-up comedian who needs his audience’s laughter to confirm that his jokes work, Trump is a public performer who needs continuous reassurance that he is doing well. Without the live audience reaction and with Clinton maintaining unwavering self-control throughout the night, Trump started to lose focus and eventually fell into his infamous rhetorical style, which mostly consists of random repetitions of key words such as ‘strong’, ‘winning’ and ‘wrong’. At some point he even made the case for his strength of character by simply repeating several variations of the theme ‘I have a strong temperament’, which produced the unintended effect of making the audience laugh spontaneously.

Despite her apparent calm, Clinton, however, never really managed to connect with the audience. She seemed somehow unemotional. She cracked a smile or two and urged the audience at home to go to her website to fact-check Trump’s statements, but she was not captivating enough in her rhetoric or demeanor to flip the many undecided voters watching the debate. Even against a stumbling Trump, she failed to dispel, once for all, the doubts many voters still have about her.

In the minds of those undecided voters she was and still remains an embodiment of all that is wrong with the establishment; she is just another Washington politician in the hands of powerful interest groups; someone who probably doesn’t really care about the people at the lower end of the scale; she is a candidate who unabashedly is more likely to support policies that benefit the few but exploit the many (like she did initially with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement).

In hindsight, one may argue that her real stroke of luck in this campaign was Bernie Sanders, whose strong focus on social issues forced Clinton to shift her platform more radically than she had probably intended to do. To beat Sanders during the Primaries, she cleverly repositioned herself, moving from the center more to the left by finally renouncing the TPP, starting to attack Walls Street and showing more care for the middle-lower classes.

Like a kid who, having just lost a fight, refuses to admit defeat, Trump hinted that his lackluster performance was a result of his excessively cavalier attitude towards Clinton. He could have really done some damage to her reputation, but he decided otherwise. He could have attacked her for allegedly spending ‘hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads on me, many of which are absolutely untrue’. Instead, he chose, to be more respectful: ‘I was going to say something…extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.”

He was apparently referring to his decision to hold back on attacking her on more delicate matters (probably Bill Clinton’s infamous infidelity track record) to avoid hurting Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea. After the debate, however, Trump seemed to suggest rather menacingly that the time to be cavalier has now passed.

Bernie Sanders by Gage Skidmore

Neither Clinton, and certainly nor Trump showed the audience that they are indisputably the right candidate for the job. At the end of the night, it became even more apparent that the absence of a credible third alternative or a less dubious candidate (Bernie Sanders, for instance, had he been the Democratic Party nominee) are the only reasons either of them still has a chance to succeed Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

Brewster’s advice

Overall, despite being a mediocre event, Monday night’s debate told us that the first round went to Clinton and, if the early polls, focus groups and the countless pundits are to be believed, on November 8 she will emerge as the first woman to be elected President of the United States.

Should American voters and democrats around the world rejoice? She might not be the perfect candidate, but she is certainly the lesser of two evils. Anything but Trump, that seems to be the consensus among moderate observers. Indeed, the orthodox view on the matter seems to be that undecided voters, heartbroken Sanders’ supporters (over 12 million voted for him), or worried Republicans should all turn up at the polls, hold their nose high and pick Clinton as their chosen candidate – regardless of what they truly think of her.

That vote would be the action of a true American democrat. But would it, really? Is there some room for a counterargument, that though somewhat challenging and, admittedly, rather Utopian, is equally respectful of the spirit of democracy?

US AssemblyWikipedia

The marriage between representation and democracy is a product of the 18th century, when the amalgamation of the old Greek ideal of assembly-based democracy – a model which “was direct and participatory to an astonishing degree” – and that of representation seemed the best possible solution for governing large nation-states (in both America and Europe). A large suffrage means that democracy can only be enabled by ‘representation’. Since, as famously argued by Hanna Pitkin, “the room will not hold all, the people would rule themselves vicariously, through their representatives”.

This particular system of democratic government, however, is far from perfect. Too often, as in the recent past, especially in countries like the US, where lobby groups and money play a fundamental and rather distorting role in politics, the representatives seem to represent not the voters, the people who cast the ballots to elect them, but the interests of the few who bankroll their campaign. The ongoing fiasco of passing much needed gun-control laws at both the Federal and State level epitomises the failure of democratic representation mechanisms in America: despite the alarming and growing number (almost on a daily basis) of gun related incidents; despite the fact that polls show that the majority of the American public is in favour of some form of gun control (for instance, expanded background checks on gun sales), the powerful National Rifle Association lobby, for decades now, has had an unblemished track record in stopping any attempt at even mild legislation on matters related to gun ownership.

If the system is rigged, if it is not representative of the voters and unable to properly reform itself from within, why then must the people continue to play the game of bowing to pre-imposed norms? Why, if Trump and Clinton are both unloved candidates, with the lowest approval ratings for nominees in recent history, should American citizens vote for them?

Why must they choose to hand the presidency (and with it the launch codes of over 5,000 nuclear warheads) to a man who “can be baited with a tweet” or to someone who, though admittedly less obnoxious than the other, represents the continuation of the status quo that has cost the lives, fortunes and dreams of millions of people not only in America but across the globe? Because the archaic mechanisms of two failing and highly criticised parties, the limping remnants of a bygone era, said so?

Can’t the cycle be broken? After all, if we look at the numbers, it becomes apparent that those who voted for Clinton and Trump to be nominees represent a small minority (only about 9%) of the American public. What if, then, come November 8, millions of Americans cast a different vote? What if, come November 8, Americans decide to take the road less travelled, maybe not unlike the fictional New Yorkers voting in the 1985 comedy Brewster’s millions? In the film, Richard Pryor plays Montgomery Brewster, who, to inherit $300 million dollars must spend $30 million in 30 days. Brewster soon realises that embarking on a costly campaign for Mayor of New York will allow him to hit his target. So he decides to run a ‘protest campaign’ on the slogan: ‘none of the above’.

What he hadn’t counted on was the actual possibility of victory. When it becomes clear that he might after all be elected Mayor (and with it earn a salary that would cost him his inheritance), he withdraws from the race. The voters however follow his advice and write on the ballot ‘none of the above’, effectively annulling the election.

Brewster’s None of the Above

If on the morning of November 9, Americans were to wake up in a country where millions of voters followed Brewster’s advice and, instead of holding their nose high, bravely stood up to the system and wrote on each ballot neither Hillary, nor Trump, but simply ‘none of the above’, wouldn’t that be a real sign of democratic power? Nothing short of a wonderful extraordinary act of civil disobedience?

2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Event Details

Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

Event Details

Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au